Anyone else remember how, in the ancient history of a half decade, a $250 billion dollar transportation bill was a big deal?

Then came TARP at $700 billion (essentially, a number the then-Treasury Secretary made up. Now we have $787 billion.

Thus, the new floor is set. Next time, Congress will have to pass something even bigger. Which they probably will. And anything less than $787 billion dollars will seem as though Congress isn't trying harder.

(At least one of these links seen on The Anchoress, where she's gloomier than I am.)

Also read this for a summary of some of the things in the bill. At 1000 pages, nobody really knows what all is in it. Some lobbyists no doubt know the parts they wrote, but no one knows what is in the whole thing.

Bill to allow students who don't graduate chance to participate in graduation if they're disabled. The disabled have more legal rights than the enabled, do they not? As a bonus, this bill has a girl's name attached to it. A MfBJN rule of thumb: if a bill has a child's name on it, it is a bad law rushed into the books for sentimental reasons.

Has anyone else noticed that free rein now appears more and more in print as free reign?

I'm not sure if this means more and more people are using it in reference to the growth of government and are consciously making a pun (I doubt it) or if educational standards or cultural references have obscured the horsemanship origin of the phrase.

Allah, the technojunkie, is swooning over the new improved Kindle. I'm not, and I don't think most will.

For one thing it costs $360. Quite an investment.

For another thing, books are not precisely difficult to carry around, especially on the places where you'd read a book outside your home -- subway, airport, Starbucks, park. The Kindle is a bit thinner and lighter, but who's sweating the weight of a book?

For yet another thing, books are intrinsically pleasurable as objects. People like books -- the feel of paper, the smell of them. Kindle is not going to replace that attractiveness anytime soon.

But here's the big reason Kindle will never catch on, as a friend explained to me:

"How do you know what to read?"

By which he meant -- without the pleasant ritual of going to a book-store, browsing the stacks, picking up a book and reading its back cover and first few pages -- how the hell do you know what you want to read in the first place?

You know, modern Americans read 36 books a year and buy 84 books. Because I bring the average up that much, baby! (see also this and this.)

You know, every year I provide a handy little boast list of how much I've read in one place. Because of the hiatus, I didn't get that list out.

Until now.

Read it and weep (for my lack of a life outside the pages):

Friday by Robert Heinlein

Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan by Vonda N. McIntyre

Star Trek III The Search for Spock by Vonda N. McIntyre

Heat by Ed McBain

The Fred Factor by Steve Gill

The Return by William Shatner

The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology by David Plotz (ed.)

Kill Him Twice by Richard S. Prather

Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon

Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook by Scott Adams

April Evil by John D. MacDonald

Ranting Again by Dennis Miller

Playgrounds of the Mind by Larry Niven

Infinite Possibilities by Robert Heinlein

Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker

Secret Prey by John Sandford

Paris Kill-Ground by Joseph C. Rosenberger

The Wrecking Crew by Donald Hamilton

John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy by William Caferro

The Forge of God by Greg Bear

First Blood by David Morrell

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Mischief by Ed McBain

Rambo: First Blood Part II by David Morrell

Journey to Cubeville by Scott Adams

Mad as Hell byMike Lupica

The Dead Zone by Stephen King

Man O' War by William Shatner

The Running Man by Stephen King

The Case of the Horrified Heirs by Erle Stanley Gardner

Strange But True: Mysterious and Bizarre People by Thomas Slemen

Top Ten of Everything 2008 byRussell Ash

Michelangelo: His Life and Works byDonatello de Ninno

Solved Selected by Richard Glyn Jones

Pogo: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us by Walt Kelly

How to Break Web Software by Mike Andrews and James A. Whittaker

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

An Altogether New Book of Top Ten Lists by David Letterman

Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain

Space Wars: Worlds and Weapons by Stephen Eisler

The Book of Tomatoes by National Gardening Magazine

Rooster Cogburn by Martin Julien

The Braille Woods by Ann Townsend

Lonesome Cities by Rod McKuen

Best Home Plans by Sunset Books

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales by Washington Irving

And To Each Season by Rod McKuen

The Job by Douglas Kennedy

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Red Zone by Mike Lupica

Sweer Savage Heathcliff by George Gately

Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Bread by Ed McBain

Paradise Alley by Sylvester Stallone

Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald

Clash of the Titans by Alan Dean Foster

A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson

Phantom Prey by John Sandford

Conquest by Hugh Thomas

Shadows Over Baker Street edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan

Love Sonnets edited by Louis Untermeyer

The End of the Night by John D. MacDonald

The Private Dining Room by Ogden Nash

Nobody's Safe by Richard Steinberg

The Careless Corpse by Brett Halliday

The Case of the Mischeivous Doll by Erle Stanley Gardner

The April Robin Murders by Craig Rice and Ed McBain

The Fruminious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain

Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov

I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore by Clarissa Start

Murder Spins The Wheel by Brett Halliday

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

Many Long Years Ago by Ogden Nash

Reflections on Our Friendship by American Greetings Corporation

The Pope of Greenwich Village by Vincent Patrick

The Lost City of Zork by Robin W. Bailey

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

Chasing Darkness by Richard Crais

Resolution by Robert B. Parker

Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by Peter Schweizer

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

The Man With The Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

A Friend Forever Edited by Susan Polis Schutz

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel

The Silencers by Donald Hamilton

Invisible Prey by John Sandford

The First Immortal by James L. Halperin

True Grit by Charles Portis

Crossword Poems Volume One by ed by Robert Norton

50 Great Horror Stories edited by John Canning

Event Horizon by Steven E. McDonald

24 Girls in 7 Days by Alex Bradley

Smarter by the Dozen by Dahlin/Tipple

Back to the Future by George Gipe

Elm Ave by Save the Heart of Webster, Inc.

Indians of North America: The Aztecs by Frances F. Berdan

The Explainer by edited by Bryan Curtis

Rough Weather by Robert B. Parker

TV Theme Song Trivia Book by Vincent Terrace

The Three Musketeers (abridged) by Alexandre Dumas

Heat by Michael Lupica

The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald

Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life by Dave Stern

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko by Mike Royko

Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

Back to the Future Part II by Craig Shaw Gardner

The Moment She Was Gone by Evan Hunter

The Great Lakes: A Photographic Journey by Ann McCarthy

Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter

What's odd is how sometimes you can remember what you were doing when you were reading the books. The first of the books I read while painting my new office space and preparing for the transition to newborn fatherhood. Later, I read a stack of books rather quickly in the waiting room outside an ICU.

Also, I remember something of most the books I read, but the compilations are harder.

I don't know why I am such a sucker for Neil Simon plays. They're short, as are all modern plays, and they're often amusing, but frankly they tend to lack a proper story arc in the two acts. I Ought To Be In Pictures and Chapter Two are pretty good, but Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound just kind of drop a couple of scenes out of Simon's life, fictionalized, onto the stage. I guess Lost in Yonkers is somewhere in between. However, the lesson I've learned is the closer the story tracks to Simon's life, the less interesting it will be.

This play has two acts about a young writer working for a comedy/variety show in 1953. We get two acts of the writers who work there ripping on each other and making jokes as fast as they can. Their mercurial boss, the head of the show, makes an appearance. The HUAC is at work, and the network wants to cut the show. Then, in act 2, we get more of the same and the show ends.

This is the weakest of the plays of Simon that I've read, and it also tracks autobiographical, perhaps proving the my theory. On page, it's less funny than a public domain episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show which has a similar vibe vis-a-vis the working environment without the benefits of wacky situations and an hot young Mary Tyler Moore.

As a side note, I always read the original cast list that appears in the front of the book and see whom I recognize. In this case, it's Nathan Lane as the show host. I also recognized Mark Linn-Baker's name, although if you would have asked me, "He played the American cousin on the television sitcom Perfect Strangers," I would have been at a loss. But give me the name, and I recognize his most famous role. A note of amusement is that he played the guy without the accent in that show, but in this play he portrays a Russian immigrant, so he's the only one with an accent. Huh.

So it's a quick hour's worth of reading, more worth it if you're doing a paper on Neil Simon's works than if not.

Even though in later years, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain got a little onto the bash Bush wagon, the bulk of his work occurred before he went nuts, and I read most of it so far before that, so I cut him more slack than I do someone like John Sandford. So I don't think anything of picking up a new Hunter novel, especially since it looks like Last Summer was an outlier in its pathology.

This book details a kidnapping of a crime world figure's son while he's vacationing in Capri. The Nanny, with whom the Ganooch had left the urchin in the states, calls one of the lesser men in the underworld circle to help her figure out what to do. He employs various methods and criminal plans to try to raise the ransom money before the Ganooch comes home or worse.... if anything could be worse.

Hunter names the chapters after characters who appear in them, often for the first time, and on the page facing each chapter we get a photograph of those people, apparently taken of not only Hunter and some family members, but other people he knew. An addendum tells who the photographs really are and makes reference to some of the other material in the book so you know he wasn't making things up. The photograph gimmick was amusing and worked for me.

I get the sense that Evan Hunter liked to write. Most writers, you don't get that sense or worse. But he liked doing novel things with his novels.

You see, for years I've been taking all the credit card offers I received in the mail and sent the post-paid envelope back with only the terms and the conditions of the offer enclosed. I did this up to 20 times a week when the credit was easy, when I got several offers a day, often from the same promotion but with the picture on my new card-to-be changed from my university to other universities people I know attended.

I thought it might teach them a lesson, perhaps drive the price of new customer acquisition up to the point that it was less worthwhile to carpetbomb the country with the offers. Also, I'm often juvenile.

Little did I know that the cumulative effect not only ate into the cash flow of the organizations in question, but because they borrowed money for short term expenditures, the nominative predicative delta accelerated as the time participular refluxion elapsed. To put it succinctly:

ÐÞª×ßµ²

I should have thought of that before the first time I scissored out the little faux customer locator code from the back of one of those envelopes.

Of course, I just made this whole business up out of whole cloth, including vocabulary and formulas. Kind of like the smartest people in the country who still work for the major banking companies and the government offices that service the financial industry, hey? I could have a career in one or the other, except it would be too hard for me to play it "straight" there and not snicker from time to time when I'm building the fables that are modern instruments of policy and banking.

This is a quick little comic, almost-heist of a novel set in the movie industry. A washed-up marginal producer about to commit suicide gets one more chance when his nephew from New Jersey shows up with a script about Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Smelling his last chance, the producer sort of misleads a hot but impressionable action star into wanting it and then gets a budget and an office at a studio. Once he's set, he only has to completely have it rewritten into an action flick and shoot it in Hungary. When that falls apart, he can always go with unplanned B: attaching major Oscar talent to it and shooting it as an actual period piece.

An amusing read. I was saddened that the author hadn't written many books between now and then and wonder what to think now that its sequel is coming out fifteen years later.